We call a finite set ${\mathcal{D}}\subset {\Bbb Z}^s$ a {\it (self-affine) tile digit set} with respect to an expanding integral matrix ${\bf A}$ if the self-affine set $T({\bf A}, \D)$ is a tile in ${\Bbb R}^s$. It has been a widely open problem to characterize the tile digit sets for a given ${\bf A}$. While there are substantial investigations on ${\Bbb R}$, there is no result on ${\Bbb R}^s$ other than the case where $|\det {\bf A}| =p$ with $p$ a prime. In this paper, we make an initiation to study a basic case ${\bf A} = p{\bf I}_2$ in ${\Bbb R}^2$. We characterize the tile digit sets by making use of the zeros of the mask polynomial of ${\mathcal{D}}$ associated with a tile criterion of Kenyon [K], together with a recent result of Iosevich {\it et al} on factorization of sets in ${\Bbb Z}_p \times {\Bbb Z}_p$ [IMP].

Blocking is commonly used in randomized experiments to increase efficiency of estimation. A generalization of blocking removes allocations with imbalance in covariate distributions between treated and control units, and then randomizes within the remaining set of allocations with balance. This idea of rerandomization was formalized by Morgan and Rubin (Annals of Statistics, 2012, 40, 1263–1282), who suggested using Mahalanobis distance between treated and control covariate means as the criterion for removing unbalanced allocations. Kallus (Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B: Statistical Methodology, 2018, 80, 85–112) proposed reducing the set of balanced allocations to the minimum. Here we discuss the implication of such an ‘optimal’ rerandomization design for inferences to the units in the sample and to the population from which the units in the sample were randomly drawn. We argue that, in general, it is a bad idea to seek the optimal design for an inference because that inference typically only reflects uncertainty from the random sampling of units, which is usually hypothetical, and not the randomization of units to treatment versus control.

No abstract uploaded!

No abstract uploaded!

In this paper, we give an almost complete classication of toric surface codes of dimension less than or equal to 7, according to monomially equivalence. This is a natural extension of our previous work [YZ], [LYZZ]. More pairs of monomially equivalent toric codes constructed from non-equivalent lattice polytopes are discovered. A new phenomenon appears, that is, the monomially non-equivalence of two toric codes C P(10)7and CP(19)7 can be discerned on Fq, for all q  8, except q = 29. This sudden break seems to be strange and interesting. Moreover, the parameters, such as the numbers of codewords with dierent weights, depends on q heavily. More meticulous analyses have been made to have the possible distinct families of reducible polynomials.